Thursday, April 26, 2012

Why do you suppose the teen victim in the Shomrim assault case refused to testify and asked to drop charges?

"The victim, now 16, cried as he mumbled responses to some of Assistant State’s Attorney Kevin Wiggins’ questions. The teen testified he was walking to the bus stop from his grandmother’s home to go to a doctor’s appointment that day. He said he didn’t make the appointment because two men in a red car approached him, looked at him the wrong way and told him he was not supposed to be there. At times, the teen did not answer and would bend over to put his head in his lap."

Many more details are sure to come, but at the moment what we know is that a man by the name of Michael Maurice Johnson has been arrested for the murder of 16-year-old North Carolina resident Phylicia Barnes. More details are sure to come Thursday. No online court records have been found regarding an arrest of a Michael Johnson related to the Phylicia Barnes case.

Justin Fenton has offered up more information on the case, including the fact that Michael Johnson was a boyfriend of Phylicia Barnes' sister, and has been a long-time suspect.*

Word of advice to any budding Baltimore criminals... if you're going to stick a gun in someone's face, try to avoid doing it in front of two police officers. Daryl Bland, 29, will have the next 25 years to think that lesson through.

Not nearly as newsworthy as hurting a dog, but half of the Johnson twins did, you know, try to murder another human being. This time, Travers Johnson wasn't so lucky in the courts, and got slapped with an eight-year sentence.

It's the old adage of "if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is" at its finest. Federal authorities raided a flea market suspected of selling counterfeit clothing by the truckload.

To get a little meta here: Not just your emails but every kind of electronic transaction you engage in is being stored in a vast data center in Utah, says Wired magazine. One of the article's sources, former technical director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group William Binney also gave an interview to Democracy Now. As Ed Norris once said, "they're the government. If they want to get you, they're going to get you." In other news, Poland (which would know a thing or two about totalitarian regimes) has blown the whistle on a torture facility the U.S. government was (is?) using there, named after the founder of East Germany's Stasi.... maybe we should be glad to see all these police lawsuit payouts-- it means local government cares enough to hold itself accountable, no?